Economic development should strengthen communities, create lasting prosperity, and secure our future. But in Wyoming today, we must ask: are we truly building economic development — or are we creating our own crisis?
Across the state, industrial-scale wind and solar projects, hydrogen hubs, and massive data centers are expanding at a rapid pace. These ventures are often touted as progress, but their impacts on land, water, and community stability suggest something far more troubling.
Private Rights vs. Public Policy
Private property rights are the cornerstone of American liberty, but they are not absolute. The Harm Principle — articulated by John Stuart Mill in 1859 and echoed in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia — holds that liberty ends where it causes harm to others.
When private property use escalates into industrial operations that impose costs on neighbors and communities, it ceases to be a matter of private rights alone and becomes a matter of public policy.
When a family installs rooftop solar panels or a small wind turbine to offset ranch power costs, that is a private use of property. It has little to no impact on neighbors, the broader grid, or surrounding land.
But when wind or solar expands into sprawling industrial or commercial facilities — regulated under state and federal siting laws, tied to federal subsidies, and designed to export power across state lines — those projects cease to be merely “private property.”
They become matters of public policy.
This is not about denying individuals the right to generate their own power. It is about recognizing the point where private use ends and public consequences begin.
At that threshold, the public has not only a right but a responsibility to weigh in.
read the full comments https://cowboystatedaily.com/2025/09/03/guest-column-are-we-building-economic-development-or-creating-wyomings-next-crisis/
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer.
